A Study on Database Indexing Techniques and Their Limitations

There are numerous approaches to improve the performances of database systems. The most efficient ones are considered to be implementing an effective database indexing technique. This must guarantee the balance between the memory, storage resources and processor of the database server according to the type, structure, the physical organization and the cardinality of data, the type of queries and the number of competing transactions. The challenge is to find an appropriate index type that would suite these requirements. In this paper, we provide an overview of the most used database indexing techniques such as B-tree index and Bitmap index, present an analysis of these techniques and discuss their limitations.